if you don't like it leave it...,
2004-11-04 12:41:01
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they did show up...,
2004-11-05 11:24:01
friday rush blogging:
limbaugh explains the "backlash" as such: "activist judges and liberal mayors imposed gay marriage on the rest of us". By "imposed" I guess he thinks that somebody tried to make heteros get gay married.
No discussion of the civil union, but wouldn't it be nice if somebody could get through the screening process to explain to him that the state needs to get its nose out of the Church's business and abolish this marriage under the law idea altogether. It's almost Stalinist: is the State God to this guy? Since when did the US Government have the right to define and create religious relationships? Etc: "insofar as anti-gay marriage blocks secular partnership rights, it is bigotry, bespeaks hatred, and deserves unambiguous moral condemnation. There is no "value" here that deserves consideration or sensitivity.".
Much of the "we need to talk about religion more" talk from the Amy Sullivan/Nicolas Kristoff crowd is at its worst when they talk about it only in generalities, which is all I've seen them do. The undefined "them and us" and "we". Juan Cole made some decent arguments on "it" yesterday, Krugman makes a case against "it" today: it's clearly not clear to anybody which voters the Sullivan/Kristof crowd think they're talking about... at least Cole does make it clear who he's talking about, but then he's going on about nominating dinosaurs from the south that have gone extinct.
If you want to play on religious turf you can make the case that your policies are better at achieving the results everybody wants: we want lower divorce rates, we want lower abortion rates, we want fewer teenage pregnancies, we want the State to get its nose out of the Church's business (conservative pundits have religious moderates thinking the gay marriage is the State butting into the Church's business - and they are, alas, absolutely right). Proggies and whatnot have better policies on all these than the social conservatives who want the state to fight their culture war, they just do a poor job of arguing to the others' concerns or selling the fact that they get better results with less state and more respect for the individual.
I don't see any sensible way to disarm Holy Joe's culture war against what we see on television, catholic fundie issues like condom use, or the movement against pre-marital sex, other than that so long as they're not censoring information or making this stuff criminal they're free to go about their business. But they are censoring information, or rather propagating false information, with the "ineffectiveness of condom use" literature in Bush's war on AIDS. And the FCC is now doling out criminal penalties for the slightest offense against cultural propriety.
I listen to religious radio talk often but I still don't grasp what the brimstone and fire is about. I have to agree to disagree with avid followers of the Left Behind series. Supporting faith based charity is how Israel created Hamas and Egypt created the Muslim Brotherhood. Intelligent Design is not science, maybe it has a place in philosophy of science classes as an argument against science. This stuff speaks to a small clique that ought to be marginalized, not succumbed to. I'm just an athiest but most of this stuff should be obvious: presumably we need a well funded liberal think tank out there hawking the right religious politics to "focus" the so-called "message".
Let me know when the DP starts actually expressing a left position on foreign policy or economics, or for that matter anybody starts representing the expressed environmental concerns of some 80% of the country. There's no time like the present, it would be a good time to start.
